Yeah. Except it's the ADULTS who are hanging on for dear life...

I usually don't like to spend TOO very much time griping, 'cause I dunno...it's a waste of time. But public school offers so MUCH to complain about. I've joined enough committees over the years to know that it's every bit as helpful to site obesity statistics while knocking my head against a brick wall from the comfort of my own home as it is to join a committee, and that probably goes triple for middle school.

The school lunch program is to the Department of Agriculture as nutrition is to _______.

No, no wait, the school lunch programs were originally designed as much to get rid of extra food the Department of Agriculture had lying around as it was to make sure school children were fed. So it makes TOTAL sense that the guys whose job it is to look after farms and farmers be in charge of the school lunch program instead of...ummmm...I dunno a lot about these things but...the Department of Health maybe? Pediatricians? Nutritionists? Ummmm...let's see...who else would have the children's health as number one concern?

OH YEAH! The parents!!!!!! I mean, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But then again, I got this notice from a parent at my daughter's school which implies not only that we should encourage sugar and fat as after school snacks, but that we push them at a frantic pace:

Attention Parents:
The After School Food Sales Committee needs your help! We are looking for new volunteers to help one Friday of each month for 30 minutes. This is an easy volunteer opportunity and only requires you to show up at 3:30 one Friday of each month and frantically sell candy and sodas to students as they exit the building. If you are interested, please email xxxxxx@xxx.com for more details.

Parents in private schools are every bit as enthusiastic about proper nutrition. Years ago my kids' preschool introduced a hot lunch program the parents on the committee were certain the kids would love: McDonald's Happy Meals. They knew the kids would be excited to eat them, and it raised a little money for the school. EVERYONE was happy, especially the producers of Lipitor and Slim Fast.

A few years ago I watched my brother's kids run right past candy and gum ball machines without so much as a glance. "How'd you get away without them begging for candy?" I asked him. It was simple: "They don't know what those are."

Even my own son, who thought prunes were candy until age three, was introduced to candy machines very shortly afterward, uphill battle that it is. Now, let me go see if my kids want some chocolate dessert pizza for breakfast...

If You Hear the Phone Not Ringing (Part II)

If you're trying to reach us by telephone, don't bother. Sugar threw the phone into the toilet. I would have taken a picture, but I thought it might dry out better if I got it out of the toilet right away. If it's ruined for good, I promise to stage a reenactment.

I think Sugar has dedicated his life to providing material for this blog and I just never noticed because I'm usually at work. In addition to throwing the phone into the toilet (he actually had to "paw it in" according to Jared, who apparently didn't feel it appropriate to stop Sugar in the act), these were his activities for today:

1) Knocked over the garbage can three times. He didn't remove any garbage, mind you. He just toppled it all neat and tidy like. I guess he understood that I had just organized the kitchen.

2) Weighed himself (he must be bulking up in hopes of outweighing the garbage can)



3) Imitated an Ozarka water bottle. I think he's planning on making his escape in one of the kids' lunch packs. I just hope they don't judge him too harshly on the standardized tests.






Here's my boy's brain, just to update the well wishers! Isn't skin just the most amazing stuff? Sure there's that scab looking thing, but there are also places where you can barely tell his skull was showing. As for Cassie, she's still not fever free but seems a little less miserable. Thanks so much for thinking of them!

MLK Day with Fever and Kitchen Cabinets

I LOVE Houston, so I'm totally NOT complaining, but on MLK day not only can we not just get along, but we can't even decide on a mutual Martin Luther Kind day parade. I'm not sure what all the controversy is about...something about one being more something than the other or something I guess.

All I know is the Chronicle claims it ended in a coin toss over which parade got to take place downtown and which parade got booted over to Allen Parkway. It's hard to believe we rely on a coin toss, but I guess it's a tried and true method for making such important decisions. Besides, Allen Parkway isn't a half bad spot for a parade and why argue with having two parades? We couldn't go to either though, both kids being struck down with fever yesterday.

Stuck at home such as we were, I figured I had no excuse for not catching up on phone calls in between dispensing Tylenol. I have to procrastinate a BUNCH before I can make those kinds of phone calls. Actually I like to procrastinate a bunch before I make ANY type of phone call, but the worst kind are where...well, pretty much if you're not calling a friend or family member they're all the worst kind.

These were the kind of phone calls where you leave half a dozen messages before someone that you didn't really want to talk to in the first place ends up calling you back at the most inconvenient time possible, so it called for some serious procrastinating. See how nice and neat my kitchen cabinets look now?


My cabinets didn't need reorganizing. I can find most stuff, usually. Okay, so I didn't know I owned a pie plate and made a chicken pot pie in a cast iron pan instead last week, but it came out good that way. See, there's the pie pan over on the left. At least, I think it's a pie pan. I'll let you know next time I make a chicken pot pie:


I have these cute little space saver devices. I don't actually need them, because my cleaning method involves throwing away anything that someone isn't using at the exact moment that I'm doing the tossing. I've heard this is a guaranteed way to turn my children into pack rats for life, but they'll have to bring that up for themselves later while they're in therapy. Right now we're just working on surviving their childhood without the entire apartment being filled floor to ceiling in stickers, string, ticky-tack, sequence, buttons, beads, souvenir sized catchup bottles, rocks, and other such treasures.

See how the corning ware lids stay all straight up, making room for kitchen devices I may or may not have owned at one time in my life? If they really wanted to make something useful for the kitchen, they'd put hinges on the lids of the plastic containers so they didn't get lost all the time.


Here's one last picture of my now tidy cabinets. I suppose by mid-week the kids will be wondering why they don't have any clean socks or underwear, but at least I'll be able to find the proper sized pot for all the cooking I'm not doing.

Random stuff

The stitches in Jared's head seem to be healing up okay (I mean, not that I would know HOW they're healing, since I haven't taken off the bandages) but just in case I thought I was off the hook, Jared decided to wake up with a 102 fever yesterday. So recently I've spent a little time at the pharmacy.Drug stores are GREAT places to pick up blog fodder, and I have to say this last time was no different.

This is what I gathered from my last trip to Walgreens: If you want a different drug than the one the doctor prescribed, the way to get it is apparently to recite repeatedly and loudly, "THAT ONE GIVES ME SEVERE DIARRHEA. SEVERE DIARRHEA! I don't want that one. What I want is ________." Fill in the blank with your drug of your choice. It seems to be effective. At least when I left, the woman demonstrating this method seemed happy enough and the pharmacist looked...resigned to his fate.

Here's what I love about Sunday school. Imagine wriggly, excited six year old bodies, hands a' wavin', breathlessly answering these questions about Passover:

"Can anyone tell me one of the ten plagues?"
"The deathness of the babies!"

"What did they paint on the doors to mark them?"
"Llama blood!"

And the ever-present non sequitur:

"Once I ate a cockroach!"

I like to imagine this last one as sort of a Texas child's rite of passage, similar to a picture taken amongst the bluebonnets...

Last but not least, since I've seen them on blogs here and there this month, I figured I'd throw in a few words on New Years Resolutions: I don't make them. What's the point? Who ever heard of someone keeping a New Year's resolution anyway?

Instead, as I mentioned on Roger's blog, I make anti-resolutions. And I KEEP them I'll have you know! OKAY! So it generally takes me more than one year, but still! I get 'em completed eventually!

Around four years ago I made the anti-resolution to start liking whiskey. That one seemed important because why waste all those calories with mixers? Whiskey seems so direct. It was hard going though, and took me some three years to accomplish.

Since that anti-resolution lasted me so long, I didn't need a new one until the turn from 2006 to 2007, whereupon I anti-resolved to start using swear words. Unfortunately a year's time hasn't gotten me very far and I'll have to continue to work during the year 2008. Crap.

It's not that it's deep. It's just that you can see so much of his skull.

Cell phone conversation that I had with The-Guy on the way to the emergency room:

The-Guy - How deep is it?
Me - It's not that it's deep.  It's just that you can see so much of his skull.
Him - That's deep enough

If you are easily grossed out, you should probably quit reading now.   And if you've never had the opportunity to discuss the depth of a head wound, watch out for those monkey bars!

Jared was supposed to have a skateboarding birthday party today. But since we happened to be in the emergency room yesterday afternoon, we decided on stitches instead. It was SO GROSS!

The PE teacher must not have noticed that she could have set a nickel down on the piece of his skull that was exposed, because she sent him to the boy's restroom to wash it out for himself.

In her defense, the fact that he was gushing blood onto his clothing, legs and shoes may have blocked her view. Surely not being able to see the severity of a wound because of all the blood is a good reason not to send a child directly to the nurse, right? Have I mentioned it was TOTALLY GROSS?

My cousin thought we should have left the wound open, since Jared considered it all kinds of cool. When I mentioned he would have a hard time getting dates, my cousin assured me that a select group of women would actually find it attractive. And since the women who make up the select group are not all that desirable, he said, Jared would have the pick of the litter.

In a distantly related note, since Jared couldn't have his skateboard party, I decided to call and ask for my 10 year old's very favorite song about alcoholism and whatnot, Highway 87 by Hayes Carll.

So Jared didn't get his skating party, but he did get to have the DJ wish him happy birthday over the radio. He got to have a song played just for him on one of my favorite radio shows. He got to have pizza with his friends.

And he got twenty four stitches, four of them in the muscle. Did I tell you guys how totally GROSS it was?

The plastic surgeon kept using the words "traumatic head injury" while he was sewing, which is actually not something I enjoyed hearing. But then I was the one who refused to leave the room, so I get what I get.

Of course I promised Jared both that I'd print out a picture of the wound for him to take to school and that I'd publish the gore to the internet. So if you're my dad or anyone else who doesn't particularly enjoy gore (Have I said it was REALLY GROSS?), this is your last chance.

Here's my boy's brain. OKAY! It's only his skull! Sorry it's a crappy cell phone picture.

I might not have been the very FASTEST mom to ever rush her son to the emergency room, but at least I chose against stopping home for the camera:

Okay, okay!

Yes! I've been a bad blogger!!!! I couldn't help it! After vacation I got slammed by "life spackle" (otherwise known as all that stuff you gotta do just to be able to sleep in or go to the beach once in a blue moon).

I did find out a few things this week: that even a birthday party that's delinquent by a month seems to require quite a few phone calls, that you're supposed to plan a bat mitzvah IN ADVANCE (!), that being a year and a half officially divorced does NOT mean an end in sight to hassles and phone calls with lawyers. Be careful out there people!

Meanwhile my kids are convinced that my car has a terminal illness. Just because within three days the battery died and the tire went flat and it started making a "Whoop! Whooop! Whoop!" noise every time I step on the brakes is no reason to think it can't last ANOTHER 117,000 miles, is it? Which led to my next discovery: while I can't really claim to have made too very many wise choices in the past where men are concerned, it turns out that the RIGHT man can be WAY better than Triple A!

Our vacation was wonderful and had everything and here are the pictures to prove it! A brand new nephew


Plenty of snow


And of course, cross dressing. Let me just say that cross dressing children are much, much cuter than transvestite karaoke, which we (that would be my brother and me, not my kids and me) went to see on vacation a few years back. I do have to say, though, if you lack candidates for cross dressing, time spent watching transvestite karaoke is never wasted.


Last but not least, no vacation would be complete without theater

Happy New Year everyone!